Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

Post by farresito » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 12:13 PM UTC

mlsu wrote: post #71

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…

Post by fragmede » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 12:14 PM UTC

IsTom wrote: post #248

socalgal2 wrote: post #195

When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws? Unlike human driven cars, 100% of Waymos are fully filmed. The proof is on every drive. And there is one entity responsible for all of them, Waymo. I've enjoyed my trips so far, but want them to stop breaking the law.

As somebody very far away from any even partially autonomous cars, what kind of laws do they break?

Post by ddalex » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 12:17 PM UTC

digitalPhonix wrote: post #190

gcanyon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years. Tesla's market cap is $1.3 trillion. Granted the company itself doesn't have access to all of that, but surely if they wanted to spend, say, $10 billion per year on something big like FSD, they could have. > didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware A little more extreme, but: Tesla…

$50k? The sensor kit on the Waymo’s ipace is north of $300k. (Which completely inverts that calculation)

Post by xnx » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 12:21 PM UTC

rhubarbtree wrote: post #204

xnx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly. I don't understand why Tesla fans think camera/lidar fusion is unsolvable but camera/camera fusion is a non-issue.

Unsure if you’re trolling, but you haven’t listened to what Tesla are actually saying. Having more sensors is complicating the matter, but yes sure you can do that if you want to. But just using vision simplifies training a huge amount. The more you think about it, the stronger this argument is. Synthesising data is a lot easier if you’re dealing with one fairly homogenous input. But the real point is that cameras ar…

Post by xnx » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 12:23 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #200

_diyar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain. However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value). But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possib…

I'm an EE, I have worked with things like sensor fusion professionally. In short sensor fusion depends on what sensors you have and how you combine them, especially if two sensors' outputs tend to disagree - which one is wrong and to what extent, and how a piece of noise gets reflected in each sensors' outputs, to avoid double counting errors and coming up with unjustifyably confident results. This field is extremely…